Chung Sang-Hwa

Lévy Gorvy New York

June 1 - July 30, 2016




Dominique Lévy Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Korean artist Chung Sang-Hwa (b. 1932). Presented jointly with Greene Naftali Gallery, New York, this represents the first solo exhibition of Chung’s work in the United States. The exhibition will span the artist’s career, with a survey of Chung’s work on view at Dominique Lévy and recent paintings displayed at Greene Naftali.

Dominique Lévy’s portion of the presentation includes fifteen large-scale canvases spanning from 1969 to 2014. On view are two early paintings, Untitled 69-3 (1969) and Untitled 73-5 (1973), which exemplify the first stage of Chung’s development, in which the artist tore segments of paint from the canvas substructure in freeform patterns. Beginning in the early 1970s, Chung’s work increasingly addressed repetition, ritual, and process, typified in the 1973 masterpiece Untitled 73-12-11, a canvas of over seven feet tall comprised of faint vertical lines of opalescent white and gray. Works from the following decade grow increasingly complex and incorporate systematic and rigorous grid patterns in darker and more vivid colors. Dominique Lévy will also present two paintings from 2013 and 2014, establishing a bridge with the recent work, from 2007 to 2015, on view at Greene Naftali. In conjunction with the exhibition, the galleries will publish a catalogue featuring a newly commissioned essay on Chung’s work by art historian Tim Griffin, an original poem by Yuko Otomo written in response to the temporal encounter with Chung’s painting, and a comprehensive chronology situating Chung’s life and work within the context of postwar art and culture.